The campaign for a sustainable, low-carbon future is not going well. A Norwegian Arctic measuring station last week reported that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere had reached a new peak, at 394 parts per million, heading for the danger levels at which we are told violent climate change will set in.

Meanwhile, an FT/Harris poll tells us that two-thirds of western European consumers are reluctant to pay more on their sky-high energy bills to cut emissions and subsidise renewables, while European industry's grumbles at the prospect of higher energy costs and even more ferocious lower-cost competition from Asia are growing louder.

And although China and India are worried about the long-term impact of global warming, their colossal programmes of coal-fired power stations are going ahead as fast as ever, guaranteeing that, however virtuous the western example, CO 2 will continue to rise fast in the atmosphere.

WHAT a sweet gesture from Trinity Grammar - to pull out its air conditioners and make its students sweat for the planet.

But the big question now with all such useless gestures to "save" us from global warming is: Are the Chinese watching? Are they remotely impressed by our suffering?

Or isn't it time we realised - after reading last week's Garnaut report - that China is now big enough to decide the future of the planet on its own, regardless of how many whites go red?

Folks, get over this white man's burden thing. China is now in charge. It will set the world's temperature.

But first back to Trinity, which is pulling out its air conditioners and telling its students to just be "resilient" instead, to show that it's their concern about global warming.

Dear Mr Secretary-General,

Re: UN climate conference taking the world in entirely the wrong direction.

"It is not possible to stop climate change, a natural phenomenon that has affected humanity through the ages. Geological, archaeological, oral and written histories all attest to the dramatic challenges posed to past societies from unanticipated changes in temperature, precipitation, winds and other climatic variables"

The above is the first sentence of an open letter to the Secretary General of the United Nations signed by over 100 specialists from an extremely diverse range of academic and technical institutions around the world and delivered to the Bali conference. A copy of the letter was sent to me by Emeritus Professor of Chemistry and former Pro Vice Chancellor of the University of the West Indies, Baldwin Mootoo. Also, Dr Reynold Stone of the Faculty of Science at St Augustine made available to me a particular publication in a peer reviewed journal, an analysis that was severely critical of the methods of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a UN body and the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, along with the US politician, Al Gore, not exactly a Nobel Laureate in one of the sciences - nor indeed a scientist.

Snow cover over North America and much of Siberia, Mongolia and China is greater than at any time since 1966.

The U.S. National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) reported that many American cities and towns suffered record cold temperatures in January and early February. According to the NCDC, the average temperature in January "was -0.3 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average."

China is surviving its most brutal winter in a century. Temperatures in the normally balmy south were so low for so long that some middle-sized cities went days and even weeks without electricity because once power lines had toppled it was too cold or too icy to repair them.

There have been so many snow and ice storms in Ontario and Quebec in the past two months that the real estate market has felt the pinch as home buyers have stayed home rather than venturing out looking for new houses.

John McCain, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton all promise bold action on climate change . All have endorsed a form of cap-and-trade system that would severely limit future carbon emissions. The Democratic Congress is champing at the bit to act. So too is the Climate Action Partnership, a coalition of companies led by General Electric and Duke Energy.

You'd think this would be a rich time for debate on the issue of climate change. But it's precisely as sweeping change on climate policy is becoming likely that many people have decided the time for debate is over. One writer puts climate change skeptics "in a similar moral category to Holocaust denial," another envisions "war crimes trials" for the deniers. And during the tour for his film "An Inconvenient Truth," Al Gore himself belittled "global warming deniers" as unworthy of any attention.